Over the past few months I've had success becoming more emotionally self-aware. Applying the same type of learning methodology to social experiences though feels quite daunting.

One of the main challenges here is that even adding a single person makes the experience vastly more complicated. Think of the difference between playing basketball or soccer by yourself vs. playing soccer with other people, and the difference in complexity becomes immediately obvious. In a social interaction, not only do you need a certain degree of self-awareness, but you need to interact based on the emotional state of the other person, the predispositions of the other person, the nature of the relationship, the context of the situation, what the other person knows about you, and each person's interests as well.

Each new person brings an entire copy of these already-numerous variables to track, and I think that's why for the longest time I found hanging out with more than one person to be extremely exhausting. It felt impossible to track what was important for everyone and to satisfy all of them at the same time. It seems like with lots of recent practice, I'm feel much comfortable in group settings. More recently I've been thinking about how to make better social experiences, whether it's in a one-on-one setting or in a group.

Part of the reason is that it strikes me that there isn't really that much time to hang out with people. Unless I co-reside with someone, even for close friends I will probably only hang out with them 100 times or so in the rest of my life. And for other friends, perhaps a few dozen or less than a dozen times total. After that, each of us will get busy and move on with our own lives.

Part of it too is that it seems like such a waste for a hangout to be kind of lukewarm, when so many great experiences are possible out there. A lifespan is pretty short however you look at it, and it seems like we should make every effort to have hangouts be positive, memorable ones.

Finally, I think I'm just kind of interested in experience design in general. From psychological and design perspectives, the problem of “how to make a hangout fun” is really interesting. It's something that I find myself gravitate towards thinking about.

There might be some confidence component to my motivation too. I recently took an interesting study that suggests that I like people more so than my confidence in leading a social interaction. This seems largely true, and I'd like the two to be more on par with each other.

But again, the skill tree of social intelligence is quite daunting. Unlike emotional intelligence, the amount of variables at play feel exponential rather than linear in scale.

To make it manageable, I think I'll probably have to scope my learning. For example, there are various special social interactions like negotiations, difficult conversations, competitions, and courtship. I think I should kind of ignore those for now and focus on making normal hangout-type interactions better.

Thinking about these types of interactions, one particularly interesting part is that I think the vast majority of really positive experiences can be categorized, here are some examples:

• Deep conversations
• Funny bantering
• Spontaneous adventures

I think that this type of experience are monotonically good in that the more an interaction approach that direction, the better that interaction becomes. There's no “uncanny valley” of deep conversations or funny bantering – the deeper the conversation, the funnier the bantering, the better.

Some of these categories require another person (deep conversations), while others can be experienced on one's own (spontaneous adventures). Some of these I feel comfortable with (again, deep conversations), while others I don't have much experience in (yet again, spontaneous adventures). Overall, those that I feel comfortable or can be experienced on one's own are easier to learn, while the ones that require other people or I feel uncomfortable with will be more challenging to learn.

Moving forward, I feel like a good approach is probably to work on one or two at a time. Perhaps becoming more comfortable with certain categories on my own for one, while experimenting with social settings for another.

Anyways, here are the current categorizations I have in mind.

I feel comfortable with, and can be experienced on one's own: – Safety and comfort – Overcoming hardships – Very aesthetic experiences – Becoming better at a skill – Creating something new – Creating a sense of hero's journey

I'm not very familiar with, and can be experienced on one's own: – Spontaneous, fun experiences – Feeling new emotions – Play for its own sake

I have some degree of comfort, but cannot be experienced on one's own: – Deep conversations – Validation and acceptance – Fun bantering

Others that seem out there or really challenging: – Intimacy – Laughing until your stomach hurts – Performing something together (doesn't have to be music, could be any form of performance)

They seem like an okay place to start, but feel free to reach out if I miss anything significant. I'm actually pretty excited to dig into a lot of these more.

— Categorized under: #irl, #social, #communications, #emotions, #streamofconsciousness

I've been thinking a lot more recently about how different my headspaces are when I slept well versus not. Though now I'm much less irritable on low sleep, there are still pretty significant differences. The biggest one is that I feel like I have cyclothymic disorder when I don't get sleep – sometimes I'm very happy, sometimes I'm very sad. Things will suddenly become either extremely interesting to me or completely uninteresting, depending on the headspace I wake up in.

This is a pretty big problem when trying to choose a consistent life direction. If you sometimes find the same thing at times irresistibly compelling and at times utterly boring, you will likely have trouble getting anything that requires consistent effort. In addition, it makes it extremely difficult to visualize what a sort of “ideal life” would look like – it requires stable observations of my happiness under various scenarios in order to extrapolate.

Now, there are roughly 1,000,000,000,001 reasons in the universe to try to sleep well, but I feel like this is will probably be the overwhelming reason that pushes me above and beyond to try to sleep well consistently.

On a related note, I noticed that a lot of my recent writings have a sort of sad tone to them. That's actually not the case – I'm probably as happy as I've ever been right now, it's just that I'm currently in problem-solving mode, and problems have a tendency to be negative-sounding things.

— Categorized under: #psychology, #philosophy, #emotions, #irl

One of the social flaws I have often is coming across as a know-it-all.

For some reason, I seem to need to think and process things on a much higher time period than other people. I estimate that I spend an average 1-2 hours a day just thinking random subjects, and as a result, I have a really strong need to try to formulate those thoughts into words. It gets to the point that whenever a conversation touches on a related subject, I tend to describe all my thoughts on it at once, which comes off as overwhelming and pretty self-centered.

Well, I think it's self-centered anyways – I suspect that vanity can sometimes play a role in me saying too much, too.

How does one go about resolving something like that? An ideal version is to find someone who is very similar in terms of the need to elucidate ideas, and has a lot of similar interests. I'll be on the lookout, though I suspect that it might be hard to come by.

In some other ways, I've come to realize that blogs are a way for me to remove that excess energy too. And blogging more often is likely a good alternative, if I could work out a balance between time-investment and quality of communication.

In the short term, I would say – expect a bit more blog posts to come in in the future.

— Categorized under: #irl, #social, #communications

Recently I've been getting a lot better at being productive on less than 8 hours of sleep. But today.... OOF. I didn't prepare enough for sleep, and getting by on 3 hours is tough.

Part of me wonder whether it's reasonable to strive for discipline even with 3 hours of sleep? It seems like something that's anecdotally possible, like if you are a hardcore monk, but only if the day itself was not that intensive.

Regardless, an interesting finding today was that I can be ok productive even with 3 hours of sleep, as long as it doesn't require much conscious thinking or willpower. Things like doing the dishes, process incoming mail, etc...

On the other hand, I do find myself getting sucked into pleasant distractions. Things that may be a bit productive or feel really nice, but doesn't seem to contribute much after the fact. Daydreaming, for example. These are actually a lot of fun, but perhaps not so much where there's work to be done.

The to start planning the end of the day during the morning...

(Addendum: one of the other inconveniences of inconsistent sleep is inconsistent headspaces on awaking. It's quite difficult to get a clear sense of what I like and how I feel about certain things when they are actually pretty dependent on how much sleep I got.)

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Categorized under: #irl

Tucson is an astronomy research town, meaning that both air pollution are light pollution are heavily restricted. Furthermore, perhaps by virtue of having lots of land, the skylines are completely unobstructed. As a result, the night skies in Tucson are exceptionally pretty. Barring truly rural or wild areas, you probably won't see that much stars anywhere else.

Wherever its safe, there's a sort of joy of Tucson night walks there that I have yet to find in all the places I've lived. As night falls, the concrete visual details of everyday objects melts away, and the scenery around you morph into ambiguous silhouettes that seem full of possibilities. The stars have a happy quality to them – there's just enough of them such that they never feel lonesome, every now and then you see some familiar constellations, and unlike their lifeless counterparts in urban centers, the stars themselves actually twinkle with cheerful energy. If you want to, you can have that night sky fill your entire visual field, even to the edge of the peripherals. When you listen for sounds, for some reason, even the crickets seem to crick happier in the cool night air.

After you take in that atmosphere for a while, you begin to feel a rush of freedom and wellbeing. The hassles, the concerns, the obligations of daytime completely evaporates, and you get the sense that there's nothing you need to do at all to be happy. It's just you and that beautiful night out there. You could do anything if you had wanted, but there's no urgency or need to anything – you can just do what makes you happy. There's a sense of limitless freedom, combined with a concrete feeling of safety, mixed with an appreciation of nature's beauty, and finally tinged with the excitement to explore the amazing world out there. It's a wonderful blend of feelings.

In my somewhat romantic imagination, that must have been what the native Aborigines felt as they explored the vast plains of pre-historic Australia, knowing that they were masters of the land, but at the same time struck by the beauty and the majesty of precisely the land that they behld. There's something about this that feels eminently right, like everything has clicked together, and you know that that is how things are supposed to feel in life.

That's precisely how good night walks in Tucson are.

Truth to be told, there are some stretches in life where I don't feel exactly happy – expectations don't pan out, annoyances get in the way, anxiety about the future piling up. But then I think about those types of happy, healthy, and wonderful experiences that I can have anytime, and it becomes eminently clear to me that the unhappy parts are results of deliberate choices I've made, for the purpose of pursuing other types of happiness.

When I realize that there's already a type of happiness that I could find anytime, those annoyances of life don't seem very concerning anymore. After all, the choices are entirely in my hands, and so I am always free to decide where I want to go.

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Categorized under: #irl

Specifically, I started playing a game to recharge before starting art, but had some frustrations that left me more drained.

Afterwards, I thought “what if I started drawing now, while I was drained?” and ended up having so much fun with it that I don't feel drained at all now.

It's a reversal of the usual trend, and something I quite like. It's a good reminder to not come to early conclusions about what you might not like.

— Categorized under: #irl, #art, #gaming

It was interesting to see Paul talk about how one of the biggest challenges while writing the essay was to avoid falling into revisionism. I think one of his most valuable skills was the ability to observe world clearly, so I was surprised that even for him, revisionism felt like a threat.

But perhaps I shouldn't have been surprised. Most people I know construct some sort of revisionist narrative in their life, and many of them felt necessary to hide once-unwholesome motivations in one's life or to deal with the regret of precious moments lost. I do this myself, and have used it to help others feel better.

There were occasionally times where I wondered whether I should have up and punctured those narratives, like “man, just admit it. Those wasted times and the pains you went through weren't all that valuable”, but then I think that save for a few moments in life that requires extreme lucidity, it's just harmless to pave things over with narrative. Under the surface, most people's life have rough patches that they would rather not look back at. Narratives are like collective songs weaved by community, a lot of times, you probably just need to rely on them to drown out the noises and carry on.

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Categorized under: #irl, #conversations

I didn't really form an opinion on this when I read it, but I remember talking to a roommate about this later on. He mentioned “that seems high” and I was like “yeah, maybe it was”.

Anyways, there's a pretty strong voice out there that says that macro-economics are too complex for anyone to understand, and that all macro-economists are BS-ters. I guess there is a small N=1 sample of an economist being really, unfortunately, right.

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Categorized under: #irl

Although I never grew up with cats, I always kind of liked how quiet and graceful cats are, and figured that this means that I really preferred cats.

This is why I was surprised to learn yesterday that my grandparents (where I grew up) actually had both cats and dogs when I was little! And what's more, that I actually preferred hanging out with the dogs back then (which might be why I didn't remember the cats!).

I've gotten a few remarks that my personality changed a lot ~10-12, and that I was actually much more extroverted before then. Here's another weird data point of how different I was when I was little.

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Categorized under: #irl

Switching to fully remote work meant that my lifestyle got a revamp in terms of useful habits, and it feels like I will be bringing most of it into the new year, and perhaps to the post-covid world.

Here's hoping that 2021 will be a good year, for as many people as possible.

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Categorized under: #irl